


The Seat of Memory

by Always_Worth_It



Category: Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Childhood, Destroying Childhood Memories, Gen, Parents & Children, mentions of child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-04
Updated: 2013-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:52:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Always_Worth_It/pseuds/Always_Worth_It
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not about the chair, Tony thinks as he stares at the broken remains. It's about so much more than the stupid chair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Seat of Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Child abuse is not okay, but that doesn't mean that Tony understands psychologically why he feels the way he does. Howard was an abusive bastard, but that doesn't mean Tony feels only hatred for him. At the end of the day, Howard was still his father. There are definitely conflicting and misunderstood feelings that linger into Tony's adult life about his relationship with his father.

It's not about the chair, Tony thinks as he stares at the broken remains. It's about so much more than the stupid chair.

The chair had been Howard's from the mansion on 5th Avenue. It was a dark, rich piece of furniture, with smooth crimson leather, overstuffed with plush that still held the faint scent of cigar smoke even all these years later. Tony had placed it in the corner of the living room of the penthouse suite, near the fireplace so that the imagined cigar scent would never be lost entirely.

During Loki's attack, the chair had been completely destroyed. The wooden internal support structure jutted clearly through the torn leather, now charred black from a stray hit taken during the Battle of Manhattan. The stuffing of the chair bled through and drooped along the floor, as if the chair were a gutted person lying with entrails all over the floor. The scent was the acrid tang of burnt metal and the after-effect of laser strikes.

Really, it wasn't about the chair. The thing was a hideous, ostentatious monstrosity. It didn't fit at all with the decor of the rest of the penthouse. Hell, it hadn't even fit with the study in the mansion back when Howard kept it there. Tony had never known why his father was so attached to the damn thing, but whenever he had wanted to find Howard outside of the workshop or office as a child, this chair was the place to look.

His relationship with Howard had never been great. His father was never a sentimental man, never prone to saying things Tony needed or wanted to hear, but it was a bit of a stretch to say he completely hated his father. He hated the kind of man Howard was, but that didn't mean he didn't still seek his approval, if not his affection. He didn't understand the psychology behind it, he just knew that his biggest regret during most of his formative years was never having been good enough for Howard.

When he was old enough to understand that Howard didn't treat him right, it was too late. Yes, he had known the first time his father handed him a drink that normal fathers didn't force children to learn how to toss back fine liquor to become men. He had known even as fists struck that the punishments weren't acts of love intended to help him. He realized that he was going to boarding school not for the best education, but to be sent out of the way.

Howard was not a good father, and he was not a good man.

But there had been some nights when that could be forgotten. Every now and then, Howard would be in one of his docile moods, where he would sit in that awful chair in his drunken stupor. He would be quiet, the soft puff of cigar smoke being exhaled mixing with the clinking rattle of ice in his tumbler, the only sounds that proved he was alive. Sometimes as a very young child, before Howard sent him away or hit him or gave him a drink, Tony would go sit by Howard in the dark study lit only by a few lamps and a dying fire. Howard, in his chair, would never make room for Tony to join him, but he didn't push Tony away when the boy curled up by his feet or near his limp hand, hanging down from the plush armrest.

They never spoke during those nights, but those were the happiest memories Tony could recall from his childhood. For once, he was enough for Howard. He could be with his father and not be in the way, not be yelled at or hit. 

When he moved out of the mansion after his parents died, Tony had ordered Howard's study to be completely renovated until it was unrecognizable. He had taken the stupid chair with him, though, brought it to Malibu with him. And how sick was that, he thought, that even as he tried so hard to escape everything his father had done to him, he willingly and purposefully took a piece of Howard with him to his new home? 

When he returned to visit the mansion once, it was as if the study had never existed. There was a relatively plain guest bedroom where the study had once been, warm pastels and large windows a far cry from the dark mahogany and masculine colors in the stuffy study. 

The chair came back with him to New York and found its new home in Stark Tower. 

It was completely destroyed now, absolutely beyond repair. A part of Tony felt relief upon seeing it. Now he couldn't keep bringing it with him, dragging up the memories of his father every time he laid eyes on it. He was free of Howard's constant shadow in his home. The last remnant of his fondness for his father had been taken away, so he no longer needed to grapple with conflicting feelings of abandonment, affection, and fear.

Most of him, though, was disappointed. The chair hadn't just been a reminder of Howard's few good nights as an almost-father. It represented so much more than that. 

Now Tony had nothing left to which he could cling for comfort. He had never said goodbye to his father. The day Howard and Maria Stark had died, Tony had just been fighting with his father. The last words they ever spoke to one another were shouted in hatred and anger. Fitting, he normally thought, that the abusive alcoholic had died angry at his son and with that son angry at him. It seemed to serve him right. 

But Tony hadn't known those would be their parting words. To this day, he's not sure knowing would have changed anything. He has no clue what he would have said or done differently had he known. But he hadn't, and he brought that chair with him to every permanent home in his adult life as if someday the words would come to him and he would say them to Howard's place and finally find some closure. 

The irreparably damaged piece of furniture mocked him where it lay after Loki's attack.

He didn't care about the chair. It was ugly and Pepper always asked why he wanted it, anyway, and he never found an answer. The chair wasn't with him for comfort. He had never once sat in it, not in his whole life. It wasn't there for aestethic reasons. It just was there.

He hadn't made the conscious decision to get rid of it, and that's what is bothering him the most, he realizes. He didn't get closure. He didn't have the upper hand, the ability to say he was not still looking for something from Howard. That part of his life, the lost son, the longing child, had now been taken from him like so many other things in life. 

The chair was every good memory of sitting peacefully with Howard. It was a recollection of the many homes in which Tony had lived. It was a summary of his eternal struggle to better himself. It was everything he had ever tried to be as a kid, and everything he had eventually become as an adult, too blind to see it until the damn thing was literally a smoking beacon in his living room. That chapter in his life, like so many before it, was officially at an end.

Tony hadn't mourned Howard when the man had died. He didn't cry at the funeral or in any of the decades since.

Seeing the chair broken and gutted in front of him, taken from him, broke something within him.

Taken like Howard. Taken like Maria. Taken like his heart. Taken like so many things in his life, all out of his control and without his permission, and this was just another in a long line of disappointments where he wasn't good enough to stop it. 

He sat beside the skeleton of the chair, curled himself around what was left, and cried.


End file.
